Nope. Your "ip_address" part is meaningless. If your database is "remote" then you'll need to configure the DSN appropriately. Whether this is possible or not depends on the ODBC driver; some can be configured for databases on other machines and others cannot. If your next question was going to be about MS Access, its driver is in the latter category. Unless you map a drive to its "remote" location, which makes it basically local. [ October 23, 2005: Message edited by: Paul Clapham ]